


On the Edge of Wine-Dark Dreams

by lady_krysis (saekhwa)



Category: Resident Evil (Movieverse)
Genre: Bisexual Character, Community: three weeks for dw, Dreams, Female Characters, Female Protagonist, Femslash, Gen, POV Bisexual Character, POV Female Character, Rare Pairing, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-07
Updated: 2010-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-09 19:29:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saekhwa/pseuds/lady_krysis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alice remembers, and it's like dying over and over and over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Edge of Wine-Dark Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently, I am all for writing in rare fandoms lately. This fic pretty much runs through _Resident Evil_, _Resident Evil: Apocalypse_, and _Resident Evil: Extinction_. Title from a line in "Insomnia in a Strange City" by Clare McDonnell. You guys have no idea how absolutely and utterly fantastic [](http://lunesque.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://lunesque.dreamwidth.org/)**lunesque** is for agreeing to beta this fic because she hates zombies with a fiery passionate, need more guns kind of hate. I love her times infinity.

Alice encounters Matt—because that's who he'll always be, never what Umbrella made him—in the desert among old, rust-stained wheels. He moves like a creaky door, all unoiled hinges, stiff and robotic, his body covered in a dust-thin layer of sand. He is a giant making the world flat again beneath each black boot, each step a quake that sends the crows trying to escape into the sky before the tree limbs snatch them back.

Alice traces the stitches on Matt's face, her fingertips lingering where his mouth should be, pressing to the grim line of his teeth. They're both monsters in the dark. They're both falling apart.

"How the hell did we get here?" Alice asks, her voice no more than a whisper, a breath of something cold and frightening biding its time in the shadows. She can feel it prickling across the back of her neck as she traces all the things Matt has lost—his hair, his eye, his lips, his skin.

Matt's shadow stretches around them, creeping slow and insidious until they are swathed in a dusky ring of black. Alice loses herself in the thunderstorm gray of Matt's single eye and waits for an answer. She watches him process the question, gauge her vital signs in graphs and charts and bullseye lines shaped like umbrellas. She knows because the same process is running behind her eyes. Matt doesn't answer—he never does—because then, there is the click-whirl spin of his gun, and Alice is dying all over again.

~*~

The dream starts with Rain—or restarts—when Alice thinks Rain has died. Alice hears herself repeat Rain's name until it sounds as raw as water droplets crashing against a tin roof. It's easy to lift the gun then, aim it so the barrel hovers between Rain's eyes, but it's not easy to shoot. It never is. Alice is still human enough to want to close her eyes and dream it all away. One heartbeat, two—each thud tightens Alice's throat. On three, she decides, she will shoot. The trigger is a weight that she doesn't think she can bear, but the squeeze is slow and firm.

When Rain's wry voice wakes her, the relief that aches through Alice's chest feels as fresh as a cleaned wound. It stings the same way, too.

_"I could kiss you, you bitch."_

This time, Alice does. She slants her mouth over Rain's full lips, Rain's face cupped between her palms, fingers slick with Rain's sweat. Alice nibbles the swell of Rain's bottom lip, traces it with the tip of her tongue, tastes copper and rot and salt like tears. Rain shivers beneath Alice's fingertips, and in the distance, Alice hears the scritch-scratch sound of claws tearing the train apart. The sound is far enough away that the time that remains can be filled with promises. Or filled with screams pitched high enough that the sound of metal and the sound of a human being dying become the same.

"I'm not going to let you die," Alice says, but it's already too late.

Rain's lips trail across Alice's cheek and down to her neck, Rain's breath chilling Alice's skin. There's the sickening squelch of blunt teeth gnawing through flesh and the electric current shock of being eaten alive. Alice tilts her head, tangling her fingers into Rain's hair, soaked through and through with blood, and moans.

~*~

Alice wakes and finds herself breaking her hands against Umbrella's walls, looking for a way in, a way out, looking for a way to save Angie when they run out of the antivirus. All she, Carlos, and Jill encounter, though, are charred cities, ground zeros, and the pretty flash of Umbrella's logo, the world still mesmerized by its spin.

Angie's body starts to move the same way—mindless, halting, constant, her eyes dead and her mouth hungry even as her body buckles beneath its own weight. The sky is dry, but the world blurs around Alice as she sinks her fingers into the rot of Angie's skin and twists. Dead bones break the same way as the living; Alice will never forget.

She falls to her knees, cradling Angie's body, and watches blood seep dark and sluggish from the corners of Angie's eyes, each drop curling into a rust-stained maggot. They writhe against Alice's mouth when she presses her lips to Angie's forehead.

"I'm sorry," Alice doesn't say, but the words reverberate in her head like static, the sound becoming an itch across her skin as she drowns in the pulsing mass of larvae that now hunger for living flesh.

Alice somehow knows that in her own way, she can't die either.

~*~

Jill leaves first, but she returns, emerging through the fog, white tendrils snaking over her arms and catching in her hair like bony fingers. She keeps circling back in an endless loop, and the sky opens above them, wider and wider, each star snuffing out like a candle until the sun is the only bright thing left.

Alice is too busy getting swallowed by the sight until she finally has to blink. She feels the barrel of Jill's gun pressed between her eyes and listens to the screeching, scraping sound that echoes around them, as if nails clawing through dirt have found enough solid purchase for sound to travel. Alice waits for the graves to open and waits for Jill, whose eyes are dark, the slant of her mouth a furious, defiant slash, lips red and bruised like so much red meat.

"I don't know," Alice says, even though Jill hasn't asked the question, even though she wants to say, _Go ahead_. Dreams don't end that way, and Jill hasn't asked Alice _what are you_ in a long time, not after Alice stood frozen, watching pinwheels spin behind her eyes, faster and faster until a thousand graves fell, the tombstones dropping like fallen angels ready to embrace the dead again.

And that's how Alice falls now—how she always falls—flung backward, arms stretched out, each trigger pull creaking like empty houses. The bullets run deep, sever all the connections necessary to destroy motor functions, cognizance, sentience. Jill has never been anything less than perfect.

The sun expands, each flame arcing out to lick the sky until it is as dark and dull as bullet casings, and somehow, Alice knows she'll wake up again. She'll keep dreaming.

~*~

When Carlos comes, his mouth is filled with ashes, the flakes clinging to Alice's tongue until all she breathes is dust and dying things. Carlos is going to die—is already dead—and Alice curls her hand around the bite wound, her palm fitting over the ragged skin as if such a simple thing can stop the infection. The blood oozes between her fingers, bubbling up like lava, and melts skin from muscle from bone.

Alice looks into Carlos' eyes, but he understands good-byes as well as she does. They've both dug the graves until the words, like prayers, wilted and died in their mouths. All they have are the names of the dead and a hopeless perseverance.

And insomnia.

Carlos smiles, and his lips draw farther and farther back, peeling like burnt paper until his teeth gleam, resembling stars in his burning face. Alice wants to cup his cheeks, but she has no hands, so she presses her cheek to his and tells him that she's coming back, tells him that she's going to bring down Umbrella, tells him ... .

His hands burn when he draws her closer, and Alice presses her lips to his flame-licked cheek, the heat bringing tears to her eyes. Her tears are not enough, though, to make oceans out of deserts.

~*~

She drags herself up, her pulse pounding hard at her temples as she grazes the tips of her fingers over the bruise. She flexes her fingers—one two three four five—closes them to make a fist. The bruise aches, but there's nothing deeper there. She doesn't know how she knows that as she pulls herself up and reaches for the towel.

She looks around the room as she wraps the towel around her body, but she doesn't recognize the somber walls. When her eyes skim over the mirror, she realizes she doesn't even know who she is. She walks toward it, the tile floor cold against her bare feet. The eerie stillness that surrounds her feels conscious; it feels like a cold air that seeps through her skin and into her blood. She searches the room and sees nothing. She swipes a hand over the mirror and is immediately drawn to the bruise on her shoulder, purple on the edges and yellowing near the middle. It aches, a dull throb echoing in answer. Then she lifts her eyes and looks at a stranger's face—high cheekbones, hair cropped short, eyes—

Umbrella's logo flashes.

This is a dream. Alice knows this is a dream. Her whole damn life has felt like a dream from the moment she woke up at the bottom of the shower, her head and shoulder throbbing and the taste of copper coating the back of her tongue.

Her name is Alice—she remembers—and behind her, thousands more—_My name_—_Our name is Alice_—sleeping, waiting, dreaming, and behind them, graves and bony, rotted fingers stretching toward the sky and ... .

_Alice encounters Matt_—

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, there are zombies, but there's also (what my beta described as) zombie kink/fetish. This is your squick notice.


End file.
